The Incredible, Inevitable Shrinking Album Cover

By DAVID BROWNE

Published: August 14, 2011

CORRECTION APPENDED

WHEN the album designer Michael Carney submitted his proposed cover for the Black Keys' album ''Brothers'' last year, he and the band were a little anxious. Seeking a change from their previous, illustration-driven packaging, which he'd also designed, Mr. Carney devised the simplest of covers: two sentences -- ''This is an album by the Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers'' -- set against a black background.

''We thought, 'Are we allowed to do this?' '' Mr. Carney recalled of the bare-bones cover, which he also felt reflected a new boldness in the Black Keys' music. Although its label, Nonesuch, was initially perplexed, Mr. Carney's fears were ultimately put to rest. ''The marketing people said, 'This is our dream!' '' Mr. Carney said, and the artwork was a go.

Unintentionally Mr. Carney's straightforward design is an example of what appears to be the latest industry casualty of the Internet age: album art. The digital revolution has already reduced record sales, and its impact is now being felt in packaging. Album covers appear to be growing simpler and less detailed than those in the past. The evolution reflects the way in which more and more fans will be staring at covers on their smartphones, iPads and other mobile devices, on which record jackets are now roughly the size of a postage stamp.

Coming releases by two major acts point toward this new direction. The cover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' ''I'm With You'' (out Aug. 30) features a no-frills photo of a fly perched on a sleeping pill. (The art is far less ornate than the intertwining profile illustrations on the cover of their classic ''Blood Sugar Sex Magik'' 20 years ago.) ''The Hunter,'' the late September release from the thinking man's metal band Mastodon, presents a single image of a multi-jawed beast's head. (The graphic is a far cry from the dual-mermen, maritime-psychedelic illustration on the front of its previous album, ''Crack the Skye.'')

''I've definitely noticed this shift,'' said Donny Phillips, an art director at Warner Brothers Records. ''I've heard a lot of marketing people and managers say, 'You have to make it simple because of iTunes.' People are conscious of this.''

Starting in the late 1960s the album cover developed into an art form unto itself. Fans pored over every celebrity image crammed onto the Beatles' ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,'' immersed themselves in the sci-fi worlds created by the artist Roger Dean for Yes jackets or examined every photographic detail in the street panorama on the Beastie Boys' ''Paul's Boutique.''

Art directors took their first creative hit during the early '90s, when the compact disc overtook the LP. Almost overnight their canvas shrunk to a roughly five-square-inch pamphlet. Even with such restrictions CD designers came up with memorable images: the underwater baby on Nirvana's ''Nevermind,'' fans scouring record store bins on DJ Shadow's ''Endtroducing,'' the homage to '70s blaxploitation films on OutKast's ''Aquemini.''

Those CD covers now feel like keepsakes from a Renaissance compared with recent releases in the social-media era. The cover art for the new Arctic Monkeys album and the Zac Brown Band's ''You Get What You Give'' amount to titles set against white backgrounds; they resemble signs more than record jackets. Lady Gaga's ''Born This Way'' and Rihanna's ''Loud'' present extreme close-ups of each singer, as if they'd been designed with iPhones in mind. The front of last year's debut from Broken Bells -- a single image of a pinkish ball that looks made of papier-m??- is strikingly direct.

More complex covers haven't completely disappeared. Fleet Foxes' current ''Helplessness Blues'' presents an ornate collage of faces and shapes, and MGMT's 2010 album ''Congratulations'' has an eyeball-grabbing illustration that could have easily been found on a Grateful Dead release circa 1974: a wave in the face of a cat about to swallow mice on a surfboard.

Art directors and designers say they've never been given blunt directives to be more elementary. Yet they admit the transition to easily grasped images is an inevitable part of the move from 12-inch discs to MP3s. ''The album cover has become just a pictographic button, some little thing on a Web site that you can click on to listen to or purchase some music,'' said Frank Olinsky, a designer who has worked on covers for Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. ''A thumbnail-size image can't replace an LP or even a CD cover, but these days I'm not sure that matters to people. It's what people are used to, and they're getting more used to it all the time.''

Mr. Carney, who is 29 and the brother of Patrick Carney, the Black Keys' drummer, said he was disheartened by the downsizing. ''Album cover artwork isn't held on a pedestal the way it used to be,'' he said. ''You can't deny that if you look at iTunes, the covers are tiny. As a designer that has to inform your aesthetic in some way.''

Some label executives agree. ''It's not something I thought about until recently, but it's in the back of our minds,'' said Jillian Barr, the label manager of Cantaloupe Music. That Brooklyn indie label's recent releases, like So Percussion's ''Paul Lansky: Threads,'' designed by Mr. Olinsky, favor large-font lettering. Ms. Barr said the preference for simpler designs is in part budgetary -- it costs less to print such covers than ones with elaborate artwork -- but also reflects the shifting digital reality. ''You have to think about the whole thing now,'' she said, referring to music's various platforms.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article last Sunday about album cover art and the challenges that artists face as such space shrinks misstated the size of the typical CD cover. It is roughly five inches square, small when compared to old-fashioned LP covers. It is not ''five square inches'' -- the size of a nice commemorative postage stamp.